Pod Save America - “Debate me, coward.”

Episode Date: August 6, 2020

Tuesday’s primaries lead to Missouri victories for Medicaid expansion and Black Lives Matter activist Cori Bush, the Biden campaign announces the biggest advertising buy in history across 15 states, and the Trump campaign makes debate demands while lowering expectations for Joe Biden. Then Manny Garcia and Cliff Walker, the leaders of the Texas Democratic Party, talk to Dan about what it will take to turn the state blue in 2020. And Ben Rhodes talks to Tommy about his new Crooked Media podcast, Missing America.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's very packed pod, we've got two interviews for you. Dan talks to Manny Garcia and Cliff Walker, the leaders of the Texas Democratic Party, about what it will take to turn the state blue. Tommy talks to Ben Rhodes about his brand new Crooked Media podcast, Missing America. And before all that, Dan and I will break down Tuesday's election results, Joe Biden's big new ad buy, and the debate over the presidential debates.

But first, a few quick housekeeping notes. Check out this week's Pod Save the World, where Tommy and Ben talk about the horrifying explosions in Beirut, the criticism of VP hopeful Congresswoman Karen Bass's views on Cuba and much more. If you're around later today at 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific, Vote Save America is hosting a special virtual screening of Good Trouble, the new documentary about John Lewis's life, along with the panel discussion about voting rights, p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific. Vote Save America is hosting a special virtual screening of Good Trouble, the new documentary about John Lewis's life, along with a panel discussion about voting rights featuring Crooked Media's own political director, Shaniqua McClendon, and me.

$5 from each ticket will go towards getting people out to vote in the fall. So get your tickets at crooked.com slash good trouble. Also, check out the new episode of Campaign Experts React with Dan and Crooked's chief content officer, Tanya Sominator. It's hard to get Tanya to do anything public. She is brilliant, funny. It is a fantastic episode. I'm so glad she did it.

Yeah, she was very hardest get we have had this whole time. I basically had to beg her to get her to do it. She finally agreed. But before we move on anything else hey how you doing dad oh i'm i'm good i'm good we are um charlie is just a wonderful baby emily is completely crushing it and um and we have em's mom here to help us for the month which has been amazing marnie is here so um we are. So we're all quarantined in our house and just doing fantastic.

So I keep saying so far so good because I'm waiting for like, you know, some bout of too much crying or not sleeping, whatever else, but so far so good. That's good. Way to knock on wood for that. You should know, you know this, our listeners do not,

that every Thursday when I go do the podcast, when I leave the house, go to my office, which is in my garage, Kyla says, good luck on your podcast. Are you going to talk to John? Will you see Leo? And this morning she said, will you see baby Charlie and Emily? So that's the best. Kyla should jump in and guest host one of these. Also, also this morning while I was sitting next to her,

while she was sitting on an Elmo shaped potty, she said, we must vote for Joe Biden. So we have a new president. So, which is something no one's ever taught her. She is just picking these things up in the ether. I can't believe you, you weren't going to bring up the video that you and Holly sent me and Emily last night where she said, let's win North Carolina. Yeah. She said, we have to win North Carolina.

Holly's been teaching her that for months. It will probably have some sort of social media debut at some point when we have appropriate gear. Elijah right now is just making the meme. That's right. I'm going to coordinate with a Michael Bay of political videos, Elijah Cohn. Okay, so catch the latest episode of Campaign Experts React on youtube.com slash Crooked Media. And we're having a big sale at the Crooked merch store up to 70% off. So go to crooked.com slash store. Biggest sale of the year. All right, Dan, let's start with some good news

for once. We had another round of primary elections this week. And one of the biggest headlines of the night came out of pretty red Missouri, where over the opposition of Republican politicians, voters approved a measure to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act by 53 to 47 percent, which means that another 230,000 Americans will now have health insurance. Missouri is now the sixth state to expand its Medicaid by ballot initiative, joining Idaho, Utah, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Maine. And a special shout out here to the Fairness Project, which is a pretty small organization that has been absolutely heroic in getting these Medicaid initiatives on the ballot. Dan, what is the success of these Medicaid expansion efforts

in mostly red states where statewide Democratic candidates are mostly losing say about the politics of health care? Well, it says that Republicans made a decision 10 years ago that they were going to oppose all things related to Obamacare, which was one of the most morally indefensible decisions in recent American history. Thousands and thousands of people have been sick and not gotten coverage because of it. People have died because they've not had access to coverage in these states like Missouri that have refused to expand Medicaid.

And this also shows that they've been on the wrong side of the politics the whole time, right? Which is people, even in red states, want access to quality, affordable healthcare and are willing to vote for that. And so all of this has been such a gigantic, stupid Fox News fueled waste of time. We could have been helping people for a decade. And it's just the stubbornness of Republicans have put us in this terrible position and they are continue to be on the wrong side of the issue. And maybe we have to win a ballot initiative in every available state to get them on the right side. I think that's right. I also think it says something about how not just the politics of health care have changed, but the politics around Medicaid as a program. Medicaid is a program for low income Americans, for parents with children who have disabilities.

And it has often been thought of politically because it's a program that targets low-income Americans. Maybe it is not as broadly popular as a program like Medicare, which helps seniors across all income groups. And the fact is, Medicaid, as we have seen since the Affordable Care Act passed and in all of these ballot initiatives is extraordinarily popular across party lines, across income lines. Like it is not their traditional safety net program for low income Americans that, you know, even some moderate Democrats back in the 90s would say, oh, you have to be careful about, you know, championing programs for the poor. It's just it's very, very popular. And it's interesting, Dave Wasserman of

the Cook Political Report made an interesting observation about how this expansion passed. In rural Missouri, Medicaid did only slightly better than Claire McCaskill did in her 2018 Senate race, where the ballot initiative made huge gains over McCaskill's race was the middle and upper income suburbs of St. Louis and Kansas City. What's your explanation for that? What do you think happened there? Well, I think it shows that the suburban realignment post-2016 is about something bigger than Trump. The election of Trump may have sparked that, but this was a policy-related ballot initiative. This was not framed in the way to stick it to Trump. The election of Trump may have sparked that, but this was a policy-related ballot initiative. This was not framed in the way to stick it to Trump. This was not about voting for

a Democratic House to check Trump or to vote for Joe Biden against Trump. This was about moving a group of voters, many of whom supported Mitt Romney in 2012, to vote for a progressive policy issue on healthcare. And I think it bodes very well for the long-term realignment in American politics. Now, it'll be incumbent upon Joe Biden and the Democrats if they win to continue to hold that group of people over time. But seeing a vote like this on something that is unrelated to Trump shows that Trump started the realignment, but it's not entirely about him. Yeah, I also think it shows that a coalition, a Democratic coalition that has a disproportionate number of college educated,

increasingly more well off individuals within that coalition. I think people both I've seen people on the left, and I've seen more centrist Democrats, both assume that will mean that that coalition will not be for sort of economically progressive policies. That maybe that is a more socially and culturally liberal coalition, but that on economics, maybe because these voters are more educated and specifically more well-off, higher income, that they will want more like centrist economics or centrist, you know, fiscal conservatism matched with social and cultural liberalism. And we are just not seeing that. And this Medicaid expansion is a perfect example of that. This is a Medicaid expansion passed not by rural Americans in Missouri who probably would

economically benefit more from the Medicaid expansion, but by wealthier suburbanites who want to expand Medicaid for poorer Americans. And it does it does go to show, as you said, sort of the totality of the realignment that when you have a coalition that's made up of, you know, more college educated voters, they're still going to go for more progressive economic policies, which, you know, I think a lot of Democrats should take to heart. The failure of the initiative to do better among the pro-Trump rural areas is, I think, something we should note, because as you point out, would massively benefit from this. And we have been in a steady erosion among rural voters since 2008, really.

And I think there's several things we have to think about there. If we want to have political power nationally at all levels of the government, we're going to have to figure out how to do better, right? There had been this thought that Obama in 2012 was going to be sort of the nadir of Democratic support with rural voters because, you know, black guy from South Side of Chicago, Barack Hussein Obama, then Hillary Clinton in 2016, misogyny at play there, Hillary Clinton sort of a often demonized figure, you know, among Republican voters or conservative voters, that would be a problem. But what if Joe Biden, old moderate white guy, does as poorly as Clinton and Obama there? And that is something we have to worry about because those voters have disproportionate political power

in the House of Representatives, in the Senate in particular. And we have to think about how we're going to stop that slide and improve our position as Democrats because we have the policies that help them. And part of it is this separation. We sometimes separate cultural issues and economic issues. And in a world where people's most important identity is their political party, every economic issue is a political issue and every political issue is a cultural issue. So there's a lot of long-term work to do that may end up not being particularly consequential in this presidential election, or at least we hope, but over the long-term, we're going to have to figure out how to do better

there. Yeah. I think there's no universe where Democrats can write off rural America. And, you know, this Medicaid expansion also shows, you know, Medicaid did do slightly better than McCaskill in these rural areas. So I think the key is to hold the margins or cut down Republican margins in rural areas, knowing that Democrats are probably not going to win those areas, but they can hold their margin down and then rack up big margins in these growing suburbs that are closer to the cities and, of course, in the cities themselves. All right. Another big headline from Tuesday was also out of Missouri, where Democratic Representative Lacey Clay, a 10 term incumbent who represents St. Louis, was defeated in a primary upset by a nurse

and progressive activist, BLM activist named Cori Bush. In 2018, Bush lost to Clay by 20 points. On Tuesday night, she beat him by three. If she goes on to win the general, Cori Bush will be the first black woman in history to represent Missouri on Capitol Hill. Dan, Bush is the latest progressive challenger to knock off an older longtime Democratic incumbent. We just saw Jamal Bowman beat Elliot Engel. How did she pull this off and what does it mean for the future of the party? I think that it's very fitting that Cori Bush won this race in the middle of the conversation about the legacy of John Lewis. Because as you point out, Cori Bush came to politics through

activism. She got involved in Missouri after Ferguson five or six years ago. And I think Cori Bush is the future of the Democratic Party. And I say that not because of her policy positions, although I think her progressive policy positions probably almost certainly are the future. I say that because the next generation of Democrats are going to be the people who've come out of the wave of activism of the last five or so years, right? It is Black Lives Matter activists. It is the people who got involved after Trump won, whether it's the Women's March or the grassroots groups that formed up people who got engaged and have been protesting in the streets. Certainly the kids in the Sunrise Movement who've been fighting on climate change, the students fighting on gun

violence. And obviously, you know, sort of most recently the people in the streets of America after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and so many more is that the next generation of the Democratic Party is activists, just like John Lewis went from fighting for civil rights to serving in Congress. I think we're going to see a lot more of this. And I think it's a very, very encouraging sign. It's such an important point because, you know, I remember when Jamal Bowman won, you know, we talked about part of what fueled his victory, part of what fueled AOC we are diminishing ideology in the win, which I don't want to do because the policy positions are incredibly important to all these progressive challengers winning. But in this race, you know, Lacey Clay ended up being for Medicare for all for the Green New Deal. What Cori Bush represented, though, was something bigger than just policy. She was an activist on the streets where he was not, and he was in Washington. She refused to take corporate money where he did, right? So there is sort of an entire, there's something much bigger going on

in these races than just ideology. It is an old versus young divide here. It is inside versus outside Washington. And in Cori Bush's case, it's someone who has sort of been on the front lines of this new wave of activism versus someone who's been in Washington for a very long time. And I think sort of, and there's just sort of an authenticity. And, you know, a lot of these progressive challengers, they don't go by the rules of Washington and how they talk and carefully constructed talking points and the same old consultants and all that kind of stuff. Like there's just a newness to this generation of challengers that I think for voters who are tired of what they're getting out of Washington, some from both parties, this gives them an alternative. These these challengers gives them an alternative. These challenges give them an alternative. And the other reason I think this victor is particularly significant is,

in the context of both Jamal Bowen and Mondaire Jones's victories in New York last month, we made the point that a lot of this is happening in New York, right? And when you talk about Ayanna Presley, we are talking, in some cases, those races have been about the districts changing demographically and politically under the feet of long-term incumbents, right? Whether that's Capuano or Crowley or Engel. But here you have – and the districts are becoming more demographically diverse and the candidates running represent those districts better than the older establishment white candidates. This is different, right? This is Missouri, not New York. This is a black challenger against a black incumbent. I think it speaks to all the things you said, and they are all tied together, right? It is not only the policy, but you can't have, I think, the generational divide, the insider-outsider divide, the activism ties without the progressive policies, right?

Like they're all part of a – they are all representative of this next generation of Democrats. And they, like John Lewis when he ran, are coming to power before the establishment is ready to invite them in. is ready to invite them in. It also shows the success of a very specific strategy that, you know, the Justice Democrats have undertaken. And Sean McElwee, our friend from Data for Progress, has talked about this before. You know, in 2018, you saw a number of progressive challengers in primaries in more red or purple districts lose to lose their primary challenge. And, you know, Sean makes the point that it is much tougher to sort of run a progressive challenger in a swing district because then, you know, that person might actually not be the best fit for the district when it comes to the general and they might have a tougher time winning that district and the real strategy is find long-time democratic incumbents that have been entrenched in washington

in safe blue districts where we know that whoever wins the primary is going to win the general anyway and run young progressive candidates of color against these older establishment Democrats in these safe blue districts. And that way, you know, you're sort of guaranteed in the general or not guaranteed, but pretty close to a win. And so now you have a bench of very progressive Democrats in the House who can sort of push legislation and push the debate. And you don't have to worry as much about, you know, someone running in a purple district or a red district. And then, you know, maybe the progressive challenger wins and then they have a tougher time in the general election against because the district is just more conservative than some of

these safe blue districts. So it is a very smart, concerted strategy that some of these progressive challengers backed by the Justice Democrats are running. Yeah, ited strategy that some of these progressive challengers backed by the Justice Democrats are running. Yeah, it's an important lesson of politics that the most innovative campaigns tend to come from insurgents, right? That was what fueled Obama in 08, is what fueled Bernie in 2016. And you're seeing a lot of really interesting, smart strategies from these candidates, beginning with AOC, Ayanna Pressley, all the way up to Cori Bush. Because they do not have access to the same set of consultants who have been – because if you work for a primary challenger, you still get blacklisted by the DCCC, which is an incredibly crazy policy that you would not want people who elected Jamal Bowman helping to keep the House. You don't have access to the same amount of money.

You have to think much more creatively. And that is manifesting itself in these races in ways that have led to a lot of success. And it also pushes a lot of these Democratic incumbents to embrace some of these more progressive policies if they want to keep their seats, right? Which is why, as we've said a million times, primaries are healthy. So one more headline from Tuesday that contains good and bad news was out of Kansas, where Republican Chris Kobach lost the Senate primary to Republican Congressman Roger Marshall. The good news is here a racist, xenophobic vote suppressor like Kobach lost an election and won't be going anywhere near the U.S. Senate. election and won't be going anywhere near the U.S. Senate. The bad news is Kobach probably would have made it easier for Democratic State Senator Barbara Boyer to pick up this Kansas Senate seat. Dan, what do you think about Kobach losing? And is the Kansas Senate race still competitive? I think with one of the lessons of 2016 for everyone is you shouldn't ever root for a racist

to win a primary because you think it'll be easier to beat them in the general because sometimes they win and then your country gets really fucked. We've been burned by that one before. Yes. So that's one less of 2016 we should avoid. It's not a guess that Kobach would be easier to beat. Obviously, he ran in 2018, did a terrible job, and Democrats had to pick up because of that. The question here is, is Kansas still on the map? And we don't know the answer to that. But Kansas has been really the case study of Republican economics for the last few years. And there's been a lot of rejection of that. So I think my understanding, I don't know

Barbara Boyer, my understanding is she's a very good candidate. And we should keep looking at that race because you need as many paths to 50 plus one as possible. Yeah, I think a Democratic polling firm put out some numbers right after the race, and it's still like a single digit race. She's within the margin of error. So it very much could still be a race. I also think people should realize that, you know, Kobach didn't lose a Republican primary because Republican the Republican electorate is coming to its senses and doesn't want to vote for a racist xenophobe. He lost because he's a loser because he lost in 2018. And Republicans thought to themselves, do we want to nominate this guy again who just lost in 2018 in the governor's race for the Senate. And so I think the image of him as a loser probably helped seal his fate more than his right wing policy positions, unfortunately. But that's that's what happened there. All right. Let's talk about Joe Biden's campaign, which just announced the largest ad buy in history, 280 million dollars in ads for the fall

in 15 different states, including not just the six swing states where Trump's margin of victory was closest, but states like Iowa, Ohio, Georgia, and Texas. Of that $280 million, $60 million will be reserved for digital advertising. And in a memo, campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon said the buy will include, quote, an immense commitment to Latino, African-American,

and AAPI targeted media, as well as discrete tracks of programming geared towards youth and senior audiences. Dan, did the breadth of this buy surprise you? And what do you think the strategy is here? It did. It did surprise me pleasantly. I am pleasantly surprised by it in the sense that, look, we presumed for a very long time that Joe Biden was going to be massively outspent in this election. And while I still think the Republican side of this between Trump and the super PACs and everyone else is going to have more money than the Democratic side, Joe Biden has narrowed this gap in a way we did not see as possible, where he has the ability to compete in a wide array of states. I'm very pleasantly surprised by that. I am pleasantly surprised and curious

about some of the state choices. And there's a lot of information, more information we need to know about it. But I think we should feel good about the fact that Joe Biden is on is winning and on offense. What do you say about the argument from I noticed from some pundits, D.C. pundits that, you know, forget about Texas, forget about Georgia. If you're in a position, you know, put all if you have all this money, great, but put it all in Florida and Arizona and Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, like you only need Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan to win. Shouldn't you put all of the resources you have into those three states until you're absolutely sure about the margin there and your organization, everything else? And then if there's leftover money, you put it in some of these reach states. Well, I think that that is a legitimate question when it comes to your overall campaign budget in terms of staff, organizers, mail, that sort of thing. But there's only so much. Let's just talk specifically about

television advertisement. There's only so much inventory you can buy in each state. And at some point, you get to the point of diminishing returns. So I do not know this, but I can't imagine it is not true. The Biden campaign has done a sophisticated analysis of how much money they need to spend on TV to win Wisconsin, right? How much they need to spend in Wisconsin, and to Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, the states they need to get to 270. And now they've had this other money. So what are you going to do with it? And the advantage of spending money in the other states

is you don't know what's going to happen a month from now or two months from now or three months from now, right? You want to give yourself as many paths to 270 as possible. And that is particularly true in a world in which we don't know what's going to happen with the pandemic, right? Let's say you're betting huge in Arizona, and then there's a resurgence in the fall that makes voting very challenging or means that we can't hit our registration goals in that state. So you want to have some backup plans, and they

clearly have the money to do it. Discipline matters, right? There's a great press release from saying you're going to be in Texas and Georgia. We're excited about that. The internet's excited about it. It could help us help bring the Senate. It can help flip the Texas State House, which is something I talked to the Texas State Democratic Party about later in this podcast. But you have to very carefully track and be willing to take the press hit to pull out. So in 2012, this seems crazy to imagine, but we had significantly less money than the Republicans because the Republicans had these giant super PACs that were spending a ton of money. And so we made a decision in that campaign that we would not run ads in, this also seems crazy, would not run ads in, this also seems crazy, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

Because if we were losing any one of those states, we were going to lose the election. We figured out what our tipping point state was, is we needed Ohio. Ohio was the state that was going to put us on the map. And so we did not have the resources to compete in all of those states. So we picked a very narrow batch. Now, at the very end of the campaign, we went up in Wisconsin and potential, I think Wisconsin, maybe Minnesota, to just close the deal there. But we were willing to back away from that public red line because we needed it. And I think the reverse has to be true here for the Biden campaign, which is if in a month or six weeks, Georgia does not seem to be in reach, you take those resources, you put them elsewhere. And so like that level of sort of tough minded resource allocation is going to be key to success here. So Jen and Biden chief strategist Mike Donilon did a call with reporters to announce the ad buy.

And they previewed some of the messages in the campaign, in the ad campaign. According to The New York Times, Donilon said that Biden offers stability compared to an erratic Trump, that he represents core American values compared to walking away from them, and that Biden is someone willing to, quote, bear the burden of leading. Then Mike said, quote, there's a great value in being able to positively speak to the central concern of people's lives. The Trump campaign is in a very difficult situation where they're unable to speak to the central issue in this country. And their entire campaign is really an effort to distract people's attention. What did you think of that? I do think that last summary of sort of the challenge of the Trump campaign,

which is that the central issue facing voters right now that people care about the most, their whole campaign is trying to distract from because he has failed on the pandemic and he doesn't want to talk about it. Well, yes, that's right. The single most important issue in American life is the pandemic. And Donald Trump is, at least as of earlier this week, running zero ads on it and hasn't run any ads on it in weeks. And so he is specifically trying to say, hey, look over here at this other thing. And people are very focused on the pandemic. And that's the part because his response to it is indefensible. Right? Like that is the challenge they have. And people are so convinced of how indefensible his

response is that they have responded poorly to his ads, according to some of the stories we've read. And that is to the Biden campaign's great advantage. And that is why you're continuing to see them focus their ads on that. Like Trump is, it's sort of insane that he's not defending himself on it in some way, shape or form or trying to muddy the waters because he's giving the Biden campaign this free land. They have this very powerful ad out in Florida with these two with just going to mention this. Yeah. You know, with this couple that is talking about the impact of senior couple that's talking about the impact of covid in their lives and their community. And Trump has no response for it, is not responding for it. And

I think he is suffering greatly. The biggest thing is that he has fucked up the pandemic. But from a political point of view, to try to ignore the biggest issue can't possibly be a good strategy. And, you know, it's it's it's a couple that lives in the villages in Florida, in central Florida. It should be, these should be Trump voters in so many ways. And I think the most effective part of that ad is, you know, the woman talks about she hasn't been able to hug her grandkids for months and months. And then she says, you know, I don't blame Donald Trump for the pandemic coming here in the first place, but he hasn't done anything to solve it. And you see a couple like that and you see an ad like that and you think they will probably have some success in the Trump

campaign at driving up Joe Biden's negatives in various ways, on giving people doubts about Joe Biden. And, you know, that's why we may see the polls tighten as we get closer to November. But you're probably going to have, and we already do, a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump or didn't vote at all who think, I do have some doubts about Joe Biden. But this guy who's president right now dealing with the worst crisis this country has ever faced in my lifetime, isn't doing anything about it. And I got to try something new, you know, and I think if the Biden campaign can sort of narrow the entire campaign down to that question, to that issue, it's going to be very difficult for Trump to counter that unless he starts paying attention to the pandemic in a way

that doesn't, you know, it doesn't involve like shouting conspiracy theories about it. If Donald Trump's reelection depends on him doing his job well, he will lose because that is something he that is not that is not a strategy that is available to him. Circumstances around him could change the electoral impacts of the pandemic in terms of who gets to vote and how those votes counted could benefit him. But there's just not a world in which he is going to wake up tomorrow, adopt a new tone and do his fucking job because that he has never done a job in his entire life. He's not going to start now with the hardest job in the world. Right. Yeah. No. Also, you know, the pandemic could get better.

There could be fewer cases, right? Like you could see an improvement in the pandemic, an improvement in the economy that could potentially help Trump. But you're right. If this depends on him doing better at managing it, then that's not going to work out for him. What do you think about the size of the digital spend in this ad by our friend Tara McGowan? An acronym tweeted an advertising blitz in 2020 that invests nearly four times more in traditional media than digital would suggest to me that a campaign sees their path to victory through an incredibly traditional lens and electorate, or they're counting on groups like Packer and him to make up the difference. You know, you've been concerned, we've all been concerned about sort of digital strategy, digital advertising, since during the primaries of this

campaign, what did you think about the size of the digital spend here, which is bigger than most other campaigns have ever spent? Yeah. I mean, it is, it is, the size of it is incredibly large. The proportion of the overall spend that is digital is I think less than some people expected. We need to know more about this, right? This is not the full, they can spend more above this. We need to know about the whole number. We need to know how they're spending that 60. What is it on? And we need to know, we actually need to know more about the state spending to truly know what is going on. Like we don't know how much money they're spending per state. Like Ohio is mentioned in there, but we don't know which markets in Ohio, the places where they've been up in Ohio to date are markets that are

designed to reach Michigan and Pennsylvania, not win Ohio. So we have to wait until they go up in Cleveland to know if they're going to be up in Ohio. Similar thing with Iowa and some other states. So I think it does say that, I think the TV to digital spend says something about what Joe Biden sees as his targets, which is older voters. Because if you were trying to jack up turnout among Gen Z and millennial voters, you were not doing that through linear television. You were doing that through a digital spend. And it's very possible that they have a, maybe even likely that they have a very, like a very smart, unique way of spending that those TV dollars to reach younger people. That is very, very challenging, but you

know, potentially can be done. So we need to know more. But I think it says a lot about Joe Biden seeing his path to the presidency with a more traditional set of the electorate than maybe Barack Obama needed in 2008. Yeah. And I think if you read Jen's memo closely, there are hints of that in there. I mean, they say that this is a spend about activating and mobilizing the Biden electorate, the Biden coalition, which is gonna be different than an Obama coalition

or a Clinton coalition. I mean, every campaign's coalition is different. And they also specifically mentioned, targeting youth audiences and seniors audiences. You don't usually hear Democratic presidential campaigns talk about their spend ad spending plan to target seniors specifically because seniors really haven't been in play for most Democratic presidential candidates since, I don't know, 2000 maybe. And so, you know, it is going to look like a different coalition. And perhaps, you know, we're still, you know, we've talked about this before, seeing some weakness

with Biden's campaign among Latino voters. He's running a bit behind Hillary Clinton in some polls there, potentially a little bit with young voters as well. But he is so far making up the difference and then some among seniors and among some of these suburbanites. These things are not written in stone. They can be adjusted over time. The piece of information I am very interested for and could be potentially coming to a message box near you is how many ads are they running?

That is a much more interesting number than total spend. Mitt Romney spent more on TV than Obama, or Mitt Romney plus the Republican side than Obama plus the Democratic side. But Obama ran many times more ads because we had a very sophisticated way of understanding how to efficiently reach voters, right? While they were just running, like the most expensive, and Trump seems to be, I need to look at some data on this, but seems to be spending ads in the most expensive way possible. It's why you see those ads during NFL football games, 60 Minutes, local news, the most expensive piece of TV real estate. There is a lot you can do with targeted cable, with addressable TV to get right ad voters

in a much more efficient way. And so I want to know how they're going to spend that money as much as how much they're going to spend both digitally and television wise. All right. Let's talk about negotiations over the presidential debates, which start next month. Holy shit. The Trump campaign this week asked the Nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates to add a fourth debate to the schedule. And if they won't add a fourth, they want them to move up the last debate to early September to account for the early voting that begins that month. In his letter to the commission, Trump campaign lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Unbelievable. He's just fucking still kicking around here.

Causing trouble. Gianni, unbelievable, he's just fucking still kicking around here, causing trouble, also proposed a list of acceptable moderators, which is not something campaigns have ever had any control over, that include various Fox News personalities and right-wing talk radio hosts. The Trump campaign is also pushing a bizarre conspiracy that Joe Biden will try to skip the debates, despite the fact that the former vice president has already agreed to the original schedule while Donald Trump has not. Dan, what is the possible strategic value in making up a conspiracy about how your opponent is too afraid to debate when that opponent has already agreed to do so? There is none, John. What are they doing?

What are they doing? I think this is a fascinating example of how the right-wing media echo chamber works, which is they are creating the reality that Donald Trump wants. It's this symbiotic relationship where they want content that Donald Trump's approve of and Donald Trump is likely to share. And so they create this alternative reality. The problem is, is Donald Trump and a lot of Republicans, operatives and elected officials are not in on the game, right? So they then create a campaign strategy that reflects that altered view of reality, right? They're getting dressed in a, in a funhouse mirror every single day.

And so in this world, you turn on Fox News and it's like, Joe Biden is hiding in his basement. Joe Biden makes gaffes all the time. The virus is going away. Schools should be opening. The economy is getting better. Donald Trump is not a moron. And so then you message like that.

And this is why they are sort of, this is a particularly dumb tactic, but they are doing this tactic for the same reason that they are running ads about Antifa taking over cities, which is something that only Fox News viewers understand, even though it's not true. I mean, the oldest and maybe silliest tradition around presidential debates is to set expectations as high as possible for your opponent. Right. Like I remember in the 2004 campaign, Bush's campaign had a really funny line where they said that John Kerry is supposed to be the greatest debater since Cicero. where they said that John Kerry is supposed to be the greatest debater since Cicero, which was both a backhanded attack on John Kerry and trying to say that John Kerry is this great debater and George W. Bush is this, you know, this dumb Texan who we don't know if he's going to be able to keep up with John Kerry because you're supposed to lower expectations

for yourself and raise expectations for your opponent. The Trump campaign, by saying that Joe Biden is so afraid to debate, he's hiding in his basement and he's lost a step and all this kind of stuff. If Joe Biden shows up on the debate stage at this point and doesn't drool on himself for the next several hours, he has surpassed all expectations that the Trump campaign has set for him. He's now a big winner. Like, what are they doing? If you were to try, I'm not saying there is strategy here. I'll be very clear. I am not saying that.

If you were trying to reverse engineer a strategy to this stupidity, you would say that they look at this and say they are losing. They cannot solve the pandemic problem. The economy is out of their control. And so they're going to take all of their chips and put it on Joe Biden debate gaffe on the roulette wheel, right? And so they're just going to say that the way we're going to win this is we are going to set the pretext that Joe Biden is cognitively incapable of being president. And we're going to hope like hell that he screws up in a way that will convince voters who have some

skepticism in him that we were right. And this is a 2016 redux, which is that living in their gross echo chamber in 2016, Trump constantly made an issue of Hillary Clinton's health and fitness for the job, which was, to be clear, just thinly veiled misogyny, right? It was just about that a woman, he was trying to say with even a modicum of more subtlety than Donald Trump would normally have that a woman can't do the job. But then Hillary Clinton had a very public health scare not long, a month or two months before the election. And that gave then credence to everything he had said beforehand, which seemed ridiculous up until that moment. And so this is, I guess, what they are possibly

trying to do is set it up so that if Joe Biden screws us in a debate, something that did happen in the primary debates, that they could weaponize that in a way that could change, potentially change the dynamics in this race. Yeah. And let's be clear, they are trying, they are priming the media to, you know, jump all over even the slightest gaffe from Joe Biden. Right. Like, and like you said, Joe Biden will absolutely garble his words at some point over the course of three presidential debates. Like, I can't predict too much, but I can predict that will happen at least a couple times, right? And it may not look very bad to most voters or to us, but I guess they think that if they can get the media to be on the lookout for the Biden gaffe, then they will profit from

that once Biden just screws up or worse. I mean, we know that, you know, Biden has struggled with a stutter throughout his life. We have seen him in the primary debates also just sort of fumble his words even beyond a stutter. And so that's something that's going to happen probably in these debates. And they're going to turn that into a big deal, just like they're doing this now where they like selectively edit videos or they jump on anything Joe Biden says wrong to sort of highlight the problem. Now, the Trump campaign, you know, per usual, has lied about the fact that Biden or anyone in his circle has even entertained the notion of skipping the debates. But there have been a few suggestions of the sort from some folks in the media. Former Clinton White House press secretary Joe Lockhart wrote a CNN piece telling Biden, quote, whatever you do, don't debate Trump.

It's a fool's errand to enter the ring with someone who can't follow the rules or the truth. I think this sounds, you know, Joe's a very smart guy, but I think this sounds completely crazy to me that Joe Biden would ever want to skip a debate with Donald Trump or could could get away with it. Yeah, I like Joe is a smart guy. He's been in politics a lot longer. And we have, I have to say, this seems like the political version of the Atlanta Falcons second half strategy against the Patriots in the Super Bowl, which is like, you don't get to just, you don't just get to try to hold the ball and hope for the best. Like he's got, he has to debate.

To not debate would give credence to everything Trump has said. The press would rightfully go insane if the challenger decided not to debate. It would be a very compelling piece of prima facie evidence that he is not up to the task of president. Like, I can't even imagine that's the case. Now, it is possible, given that insane list the Trump campaign put out of acceptable moderators, including just Fox News panelists like real world star Rachel Campos Duffy, like that they want to create an environment where Donald Trump looks like he wants to debate,

which is why he proposes fourth debate. But then they are unable to come to an agreement on format and moderator. And therefore, they can then try to convince people that Joe Biden was the one who walked away from the table. That also seems like a little bit of a lark to me. But I mean, here's the problem with this strategy, too. So the nonpartisan commission on presidential debates, right? They are now like the Trump campaign is now making demands of the commission. You must use these moderators. You must give us four debates. You must move up one of the commission. You must use these moderators. You must give us four debates. You

must move up one of the debates. So they're making all these demands of the commission, yet they're also letting it be known that their campaign really wants to debate. So therefore, all the leverage in the negotiations is with the commission. Because if the commission tells the, the commission knows that if they tell the Trump campaign to fuck off with all these demands, the Trump campaign is still going to come debate anyway because they're running around saying how much they want to debate. I feel wrong bursting your bubble on this one right here on Zoom. But the art of the deal is not a real book. And Donald Trump is not a master negotiator.

He is not real. I don't think this is particularly well thought through what incentive does the commission have to meet any of these crazy demands by a campaign i'll tell you what it does one is if there aren't debates the commission will go away and two the members of the commission all play leading roles in the both sides play that is washington i know i know i know i know, I know. If they're OK, if they're smart. Yeah. Listen to us, members of the Presidential Debate Commission. All right. The other thing, the other thing I'd love to understand here is why the Trump campaign thinks that they will benefit from an additional few hours of the American people hearing stuff like this from their candidate. And, you know, there are those that say you can test too much. You do know that. Who says that? Oh, just read the manuals, read the books.

Manuals? Read the books. Read the books. What books? What testing does. No, I'm sorry. Wait a minute. Let me explain. A thousand Americans are dying sorry. Wait a minute. Let me explain.

A thousand Americans are dying today. They are dying. That's true. And it is what it is. I did more for the black community than anybody with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, whether you like it or not. You believe you did more than Lyndon Johnson who passed the Civil Rights Act? I think I did, yeah. How?

Because I got criminal justice reform done. And I do wish her well. I'm not looking for anything bad for her. I'm not looking bad for anybody. And they took that and made it such a big deal. We had the ability to test. Okay. Because we came up with tests.

But South Korea. Jonathan, we weren't even, when I took over, we didn't even have a test. Now, in all fairness, there was no test. The virus didn't exist. We're lower than the in all fairness, there was no test for this. Why would you have a test? The virus didn't exist. We're lower than the world. Lower than the world? Lower than Europe.

In what? In what? Take a look. Right here. Here's case death. So we have a new phenomena. It's called mail-in voting. Where you send where a governor... It's been here since the civil war.

In terms of... Look, let's do concrete. Let's do concrete. They're sending out applications, millions of ballots. No, they're not. There are applications. There is no way. Okay, thank you.

Thank you very much. My favorite part of that is Jonathan Swan just saying, lower than the world. So that was a super cut from our friends at Pachronym of Jonathan Swan's Axios interview with Trump last week. Was it last week? Oh, it was this week. I don't know.

They're all blending together. Look, between a pandemic and you having a newborn, time lost all meaning. And it'll start meaning something years from now. I'm not there yet personally. At some point floating in time, there was this Axios interview. What did you think of the interview? I mean. What did you think of, specifically, what did you think of how Jonathan Swan did, you know, I was one of the many people who praised him on Twitter because I think he, you know, followed up when Donald Trump said something fucking crazy.

I mean, he did great. Like it was, he took no bullshit, right? Which people tend to do in interviews with Trump. And there's an interesting, a couple of interesting things about it, I think. One is Trump, both in the Swan interview and in the Chris Wallace interview a few weeks ago, Trump went in thinking he was having a conversation with his friends at Fox News, with a friendly interviewer. And it's been so long since he's done an interview with someone who is not a friendly interviewer that he doesn't know how to do them anymore, right? He has not taken live pitching in a very long time, and he was completely flexed. And I take nothing away from either Jonathan Swan or Chris Wallace, who I think both did

incredibly excellent jobs. But it says more about the other people who have interviewed Trump than Swan and Wallace with how much praise they've gotten. Because being prepared, knowing the facts facts and asking follow-up questions and just look like doing a little film study to see what, you know, how the Trump typically tries to get out of telling the truth is not fucking sorcery, right? It is journalism. It's good journalism, but like David Muir should, if David Muir were to watch either of those interviews, he would, he should just resign from journalism at that point because he did such a terrible job. He actually got himself.

By the way, we should say that he got himself on the list. He was right below Rachel Campos Duffy on the list. No, I totally I mean, it made me think about these White House briefings that we've seen lately, both with Kayleigh McEnany and Donald Trump, where like I've come to now think I think they're just useless at this point because Donald Trump has a strategy. And so does Kayleigh McEnany, where you get asked a question, you just lie, you say something fucking crazy, and then you move on to the next question because no one challenges you. Then you move on to the next question because no one challenges you. Because if you if a reporter tries to ask a follow up, you say, no, I'm going to call on someone else. You call the next reporter and the next reporter just decides to ask something completely different. Doesn't follow up for their colleague.

Doesn't say, hey, my colleague just asked to follow up. You said something sort of crazy. This doesn't seem right. This doesn't seem true. I want to go back to what my colleague just said. They don't have any strategy. And I get it. They're all competing against each other for scoops. But what it what it does is it makes the briefings, these briefings completely useless. And it gives the Trump and the Trump White House just an easy way to get out of shit. And the proof is Jonathan Swan and Chris Wallace.

Every time Donald Trump or his White House is challenged and someone follows up on one of their lies, they completely fall apart. They completely fall apart. And like the other reporters haven't figured out how to coordinate strategy to make sure that happens when they're asking questions during a briefing. So I don't I don't understand the purpose of them anymore. understand the purpose of them anymore. I feel like for three and a half years, I've been having a similar conversation with you and my wife about these briefings, which is like, why are the questions so terrible? Whenever there's a press conference, why are the questions so terrible? And I think it's never going to get better. It's not a solvable problem. It is, as you point out, the power dynamic, and we know this from having worked in the

White House, the power dynamic benefits the person behind the podium. It's very different than an interview. It is very hard to interrupt a president or a press secretary in the middle of their remarks when they're saying something. And they get to control who asks the next question. Reporters, there's a collective action problem among reporters. They have no incentives to strategize, which is why the White House Correspondents Association is a toothless organization. It has no power because they do not have each other's

interests. And, and this is critically important, is that briefing room is filled with conservative safe spaces. So Jonathan Karl or Caitlin Collins or someone else is hammering Trump or Kayleigh McEnany, they just go find the Fox person, the Breitbart person, the OAN person, right? And there are no progressive organizations in that briefing room right now, right? At least, like, I don't know why you guys haven't sent Brian to the white house. He lives like a mile away. Like that would be helpful, but in all seriousness, like applied for a press pass. I can't remember. Right. I mean, it's actually, there's a lesson for the Biden white house about the advantage of, uh, nurturing, uh,

a progressive media infrastructure. Uh, but that's a different conversation, but like, it's just impossible. You're never going to succeed in that briefing. There can be a moment where one reporter really nails the president and the press secretary. We've seen that happen a couple of times, but they just have a huge advantage. And there's no incentive for the reporters to work together. Every once in a while, you see someone do the right thing. I think this happened a day or two ago where someone followed up on someone else's question that had come up. And that does happen periodically. But that's usually because the person behind the podium is screwed up and not moved directly to one of their friends. So interviews is where, and we got all this crap

for all the interviews Obama did, but interviews with objective journalists is the best, most revelatory way to hold a politician accountable, much more so than these press conferences. And look, and the reason we're talking about this, it goes back to the conversation we're having about the debates, because that's why it's so important for the commission to not give in to the Trump campaign's demands for a safe space moderator, which that list of people largely was. Not completely.

There were some fair journalists on there. But by and large, that was a bunch of safe spaces for the Trump campaign. And these debates cannot be moderated by people like that. And I do think, again, the Trump campaign wants the debates. So you either get a real moderator and you show up to debate Joe Biden, or you're the one who doesn't want to debate because you didn't, you weren't guaranteed a safe space on the debate stage. The inclusion, we joke about it, but the inclusion of David Muir and Nora O'Donnell, who I think is a good interviewer and an excellent journalist. I was surprised by including Nora.

Nora was like the one that I was like, oh, I'm wondering why they, because I think she's a pretty good journalist. That's evidence that they actually want the debates. You have to put, there have to be some, Biden would, I think, agree to Nora O'Donnell in two seconds as a debate model. And David Muir, for as terrible as he was in his interview with Trump, is not a pro-Trump journalist. He's just a bad interviewer. And Biden could not and would not reject David Muir, I think, either if that's who the commission proposed. So buried in there is the admission. They threw a lot

of red meat to all of their right-wing friends. But in there is the path potentially to some number of debates. I do think also this is what happens when you – you sort of ask the question is, if you watch Trump speak in public, why would you possibly think your victory depended on him speaking in public? And part of it is because no one ever tells him he does a bad job. And I sometimes joke that, you know, the saying about George W. Bush, that he was born on third base, but thought he hit a triple, right? Donald Trump is someone who comes up to bat, strikes out swinging, and every single time walks back to the dugout thinking he hit a home run. And so he looks at that interview and thinks he did great. Right.

He watches his Fox and Friends performance the next morning and thinks he did great. So he thinks he's smart and no one around him has the ability to tell him otherwise so that they run this strategy that, like I said, it's based on a funhouse mirror version of Trump. him otherwise, so that they run this strategy that, like I said, it's based on a funhouse mirror version of Trump. I also think the Trump campaign has probably strategized that right now we are in a campaign environment where, like, Donald Trump says crazy shit every day that gets the lion's share of the coverage. And once in a while, a Biden gaffe slips through. But it is mostly about how many crazy things Donald Trump says every day. If you get into a debate stage where Donald Trump continues to say crazy shit for three hours up on stage in front of a national audience, that's nothing really new to people. Biden to make a number of gaffes that the media focuses on because everyone is inured to the fact

that Donald Trump is always saying crazy shit, then that is a marginal win for the Trump campaign. That's right. It's an inspiring strategy, Dan. It's an inspiring strategy. All right. When we come back, we will have Dan's conversation with Manny Garcia and Cliff Walker, the leaders of the Texas Democratic Party. And stick around after that to hear Tommy talk to Ben Rhodes about his brand new Crooked Media podcast, Missing America. I'm now joined by the Executive Director and Deputy Executive Director of the Texas Democratic Party,

Manny Garcia and Cliff Walker. Hey, guys, thanks for joining the show. Thanks for having us. All right. I want to start with what is a question that Democrats have been asking for a very long time. Is this the year that we can turn Texas blue? Hell yes. All right. Good. You know, yes.

All right. Good. You know, yes. I mean, we've been like, we've been having this conversation for, you know, since really since 2012 about when Texas would finally be to what we believe it's destiny to be, which is a purple to bluish state. You know, we came tantalizing close in 2018 with Beto's race against Ted Cruz. What is different in 2020? Look, the first thing, it's all about the people, right? I mean, we have a wonderful, talented team. We're very excited about them. We have nearly 100 people, nearly 100 talented operatives at the Texas Democratic Party and great partnerships with all of our candidates. But at the end of the day, Texas is just there. I mean, for a long time,

we've had the raw population to be a blue stronghold, but there had been held backs on whether to really invest or not. You know, Republicans have obviously put obstacles in front of our way to obstruct people's ability to have their voice heard at the ballot box. But what we've seen over the trajectory of the past several years is in 2016, for the first time in two decades, we became a single digit state. And a lot of folks just told us, well, that's just because Donald Trump was on the ticket. And then Beto came within three points. And then they were like, well, that's just because Beto O'Rourke was on the ticket. And that was just like a unique campaign. Well, you know, now we're back to Donald Trump and we got, you know, all these state house, we're just nine

seats away from flipping the state house. We have more congressional targets here than any state in the country. We have a U.S. Senate race that's within single digits already. And Joe Biden is consistently pulling up over Donald Trump over and over and over again. I think it's just because of Texans. They've wanted a massive change. They've been frustrated with what the Republican Party has given them. And when you look at our population, we are fast growing and we're incredibly diverse. Texas looks like the Democratic coalition.

And if we just speak to them and we're proud about who we are and we make sure that we get them the information to come out to vote, we win. Just to piggyback off of that a little bit and dive into some of the numbers, we came within around 215,000 votes from carrying the state in 2018. But there's still 2.4 million Democrats who did not vote in a midterm election. Not terribly surprising, although we did have an incredibly fired up turnout in large part thanks to Beto and the down-ballot candidates. But going into presidential year, we think we have an excellent opportunity to mobilize folks.

We're seeing high turnout, not just across the country, but here in Texas, in our primary, in our runoff. And then when you layer on the confluence of opportunity, it's a perfect storm for Democrats in Texas. And Republicans get this. They know that the Texas House is verged to flip. There are in-state investors. There are out-of-state investors that are coming in big to really get the job done to flip the Texas House. We're nine state house seats away. We were within single digits in 22 seats in 2018. The congressional opportunities are expansive and expanding. We had seven targeted seats at the beginning of the cycle when the DCCC said that Texas was the focal point of the offensive strategy in the country. That list, you would

expect it to whittle down as the cycle continues, but it has grown, potentially. In the last week or two, there have been very encouraging polls that have been publicly released in three additional congressional seats that are not yet on that target list. We've got a U.S. Senate seat where John Cornyn, you know, is unknown by two-thirds of people, ones who do, uh, no one don't like it. And then you're right. Texas is a jump ball at the presidential level. Uh, we, I checked the five 38, uh, breakdown every morning. Uh, man, it gives me grief. We all live on the polar coaster here. It's okay. But it's, it's not just, uh, I mean, you pick your polar coaster. It's not just 538.

You know, we see The Economist that is now listing us as a toss-up. I think NBC this morning released that we were a toss-up state as well. And this is new territory for Texas. So when you layer in all of these opportunities, about a third of our congressional states will be competitive. And that's even to talk about the new Democrats. We've got a bunch of folks that have moved in. We're poaching Democrats from other states. That's all we're going to get another three or so congressional districts after reapportionment. But the folks that are moving in, we're registering those people in droves. In spite of the fact that there's been a pandemic, which has, I think, impacted everybody across the country, we are

still, as we estimate right about now, closing out on about 200,000 net Democratic voters registered since the last presidential election. I wanted to ask you about that because, you know, around the country, we have seen, because of the pandemic, we've seen dramatic drops in voter registration rates. It was up to 75% in some states. Are you guys having success registering new voters in this obviously very challenging environment? And if so, what are you doing? creative, right? We have never been the darling of some of the larger money in the state. So we've had to, for instance, raise a lot of money online. We raised more money online than any other state party by double. In fact, during this last virtual convention that we had, which was the first big virtual convention in the country, we raised a million and a half dollars from 40,000 people across the country who went to 38for38.com and contributed 38 bucks, right? But to actually go back to your question, you know, I think what is a little bit different

about what we are doing on the voter registration front, is we identify those Democrats who are moving into the state. This is something that we engineered in 2018. It's just in a pilot project, and this is with the partnership of Beto O'Rourke, so we were able to fund it. We mailed 700,000 applications to register to vote to Democrats who'd moved in the state. We pre-filled them with the voters' information, and we included an envelope that was stamped and addressed to the clerk. So while we do not have online voter registration in the state, we have to get creative in finding

ways to get applications that will be filled out in front of people. We know that emailing them a PDF isn't really enough to get them to actually, I mean, who has a printer in their home? I don't. I mean, I know many millennials and Gen Z voters who do. Right, so we've got to get creative. And that's the thing that we're doing now. We have a couple hundred thousand more applications

that are about to hit mailboxes in 10 days. And since we do not have online voter registration, we created a website called registertexas.com. If you go to registertexas.com, you can check your registration status, but you can also plug in your information. We will download it. We will print out the app, mail it along with the envelope and an addressed envelope with a stamped envelope and send it out to the voter. All they have to do is review it, sign it, pop it in the mail, and then they're on their way to be registered. So we know we have to eliminate hurdles in anything that we can do to just shave off a few minutes or seconds from the process means that you get a higher yield. So those are

the things that we're doing to innovate. One of the big questions that's hanging over the presidential race is how much is Joe Biden going to play in Texas, right? They made an announcement about an ad buy, which says they're going to spend in Texas. We don't know yet how much. And this is a $50, $60 million investment, right? How essential is it for your congressional races, the MJ Hager race against Cornyn, and the down ballot stuff that Joe Biden played big in Texas? Look, I want to say one of the lessons that I think Democrats have learned over the past several years in particular is that when you run everywhere, you got a local Democrat who increases turnout in your district, right?

In the 2018 cycle, we ran nearly 100% of our state legislative seats for the first time ever. And we ran 100% of our congressional seats. In this cycle, we were matching those numbers again. So there is both a, you know, uplift effect. And it goes vice versa, right? And you're running a true coordinated campaign. And one of the things we tend to get, the media covers everything like a horse race. It's this bank account versus this bank account. And as if voters experience the world that way. They don't just experience Joe Biden commercials

and Donald Trump commercials. They experience all this slew of, you know, mail and conversations and text messages and digital ads and then TV commercials layered upon it from all sorts of different people within a certain message that they consume and feel with and whether or not it responds to their lived experience. And when you have a state where our state house districts, our competitive state house districts overlap with our competitive congressional districts, both of which are going to be fully funded endeavors with massive amounts of resources,

both from very well-funded campaigns, as well as outside organizations coming in and supporting these efforts from across the country. Then you layer in a U.S. Senate race and MJ Hager, who is just a kick-ass candidate and is working with us and fully integrated with us and doing a just rock star job. The proposition to the Joe Biden campaign is no longer to take, you know, the $100 million endeavor that it would take to take Texas on your own. There's already tens of millions of Democratic mobilization dollars in the infrastructure. Our state party is larger than it's ever been. You got Beto O'Rourke's operation. You got those statehouse races. You got the congressional campaigns. You got the U.S. Senate campaign. All of that is going to bring out Democratic voters,

too. And so the proposition for the Joe Biden campaign is really, how do you integrate with all of those efforts? How do you best complement those efforts? And it turns out that we also have a very, very, very popular candidate in Joe Biden who is very well liked, while the Donald Trump polling has had him pretty horrible here. And not just in this election, but in the 2016 election, he was quite weak here, too. in this election, but in the 2016 election, he was quite weak here too. And, you know, obviously you brought up these state house races. Can you help our non-Texas listeners, maybe some of our Texas listeners, understand the importance of flipping the house in Texas and what that means going forward, particularly in a redistricting year? Yeah, I'll briefly say both Cliff and I are like house trained. We both came up through Texas State House races and worked in the Texas Capitol.

And, you know, we're leading into a redistricting session here. And when when you take a chamber like the Texas House of Representatives, you're able to set representation really for a generation. You can really make some massive change here. And, you know, some folks might remember the name Tom DeLay, who gerrymandered congressional districts in Texas in the middle of a decade and, you know, tried to break the rules on the process. This is big. And it's not only for, you know, what kind of what electoral

representation looks like for the next decade. It's also the effect of Texas on the national and world scale. We're one of the largest economies in the world. And what policymaking happens in Texas ends up affecting many of the states across the country. So when you can flip a chamber here, you can completely grind, the Republican effort can be completely stopped. And you not only bring, you know, real change to millions of people from healthcare to education, but you also just completely stop the Republican agenda in its tracks in the biggest place in the country. I mean, this was considered the stronghold of the Republican Party. And it's

the one that I think, you know, flips on a dime. For our listeners who want to help support your efforts to turn Texas blue, where do they go? And what can they do either both financially and in terms of volunteer opportunities? Well, you can actually do both by texting votes to 21333 make it very easy. Texting votes to 21333 will put you in the queue to make sure that you see what volunteer opportunities that we have up and running. One quick note. You know, I think we all had our best laid plans at the start of the year for very massive field campaigns. the year for very massive field campaigns and shortly after we announced ours which was right after our primary on Super Tuesday, a week after that we went to remote working and all of the staff that Manny just mentioned are all working virtually. So the plan to have a bunch of canvassers and organizers on the ground was put, we had to get creative and think of something different.

So we launched a platform that we call Connect Texas, which is a Slack platform, but we've got thousands of folks on there. Originally, we launched it as a sort of mutual aid society. So people who are identifying needs in their communities, resources, volunteer opportunities, they could connect with others and learn from what people are doing in one region and apply some of those learnings across the state. Well, now we've reoriented that

towards voter communication. And I've been looking at the Connect Texas signups today and there are people from all across the country. And I think that's in part, thanks to what we're doing today, what we're doing here. That is an excellent place to connect and join the Distributed Voter Contact Team. But we do have a weekend of action that started a little earlier. Weekend starts on Thursday in Texas this week. And we're going to text this week and dial a million voters across the state.

And that is tremendous for us. Just one last quick note that I'll share to give you a sense of the scale that we have to do things in Texas. Just last week, we held what we call our Black Voters Matter Week of Action. And your listeners may not know this, but Texas is home to more Black people than any other state in the country. And as we know, Black voters are the backbone of the Democratic Party. And we often hear that too often candidates and parties and whatnot get religion the Sunday before Election Day. So we wanted to live our values and start by reaching out to our base. And last week, over the course of a week, we mobilized candidates, our local party committees, our Texas Coalition of Black Democrats, which is our Black Caucus, and crucially, Better Works Powered by People. we called and texted a million times to Black voters across the state to really kick off our coordinated campaign in a way that was reflective of our values. We pitched voter registration,

vote by mail, and opportunities to volunteer. And we're excited to do that again, keeping up that pace. That was the biggest voter contact week that we had. But I think we are in queue. I'm seeing the shift numbers grow on my screen right here. And I'm pretty convinced that we're going to expand beyond that this week. So that's going to help, you know, as Manny mentioned, those congressional, the state house races. And we didn't speak much about the State Board of Education, which sets education policy and determines curriculum in the state of Texas. Since we buy so many textbooks, that impacts schools across the country.

So when we do it, when we have a Democratic-led State Board of Education, which is very possible, there are three seats that were within a single digit this past election, 2018, and we are, guess what, three seats shy of flipping the State Board of Education, that's a big darn deal. We've got four seats on the Texas Supreme Court. We've got three seats on the Court of Criminal Appeals that are up statewide. These are hugely impactful, and you impact all of these folks. And lest I forget, the Railroad Commission, which has nothing to do with railroads in Texas, but regulates our oil and gas industry. Of course, welcome to Texas. But it regulates our oil and gas industry. Right now, it's through Republicans.

You can guess the kind of policies that are coming from there. We have a chance to get a Democrat on that board, which would make this, I would argue, the most important environmental race in the country outside of the presidency. So everything is bigger in Texas. And I know that that has made folks nervous in the past, but given the confluence of opportunity, we can get it all done in one fell swoop. That's great stuff. You guys, we made a great case for playing in Texas. Cliff, Manny, thank you guys so much for joining us on Pod Save America and good luck with everything you were doing in this

election. I'm sure we will talk again before election day. Thank you. Great to be with you. Thank you. On the pod, we have Ben Rhodes. You know him, you love him. He is the host of Pod Save the World. He is also the host of the brand new, incredible podcast, Missing America. Ben, it's great to connect with you through the same fucking Zoom for this very different show. Yes. I haven't crossed over to PSA in a while, Tommy. This is high. We're going to have to rant about Mike Pence or something at some point in this just to get into the domestic feel.

Just so I know, is there a different vibe now than to PSTW? I mean, I, you know, or do I have to like become more sober? No, I think the opposite. I'd like to think that we're the high-minded version. So you can really dumb it down for me now that we're on this side of the house. So Ben, I'm excited to talk to you

because Missing America is out. I've gotten to listen to I I think, half of the episodes. It is incredible. You're reporting from the before times from around the world. Can you give listeners a sense of what Missing America is about and why you wanted to do this show now? Yeah. So it's basically about what has happened to the world in the absence of America.

We have not been the country that historically we've at least tried to be to the world in the absence of America. We have not been the country that historically we've at least tried to be around the world in the last three and a half years under Donald Trump. So we've literally gone missing. We're not present. And the COVID response shows it most acutely, but it's not just that. What's happened to the spread of nationalism, the spread of disinformation, the spread of climate change, all these kinds of problems, diseases that have been spreading around the world have gotten much worse in the absence of America trying to do anything about them. And in some cases, America being a part of the problem here. So I wanted to both show people a global perspective on just what has happened around the world in the absence of American leadership and also get

insights into, well, what do we need to do about that if we're able to get past Trump and have an opportunity of a democratic administration? Yeah. I mean, that's what I think is so cool about the show, right? Because you're talking about these global systemic challenges facing countries around the world and how they aren't getting addressed in part because traditionally America's leading that effort to solve them. But so, you know, obviously Trump looms large here and is a big reason for that absence of U.S. leadership, but he's not the root of all these problems. And I thought one really fascinating example, an illustrative example was what Facebook has done to Burma's democracy. Can you talk about that story? Because I thought those

activists that you interviewed for that story? Because I thought those activists that you interviewed for that episode were just incredible. Yeah. Well, and first of all, Tommy, it speaks to a bigger thing that I was traveling a lot and talking to a lot of people, meeting a lot of interesting people. And then I even started recording those conversations before I even knew I was going to do a podcast. So when I first met the guy who told the Burma story, I didn't even know I was going to do this podcast. And I went back to him to record it. And what I found, Tommy, is that I could actually understand better what was happening in America by looking at what was happening in other countries, because the same shit is happening everywhere. So the Burma Facebook story is an extreme version of what's happening here.

And the story that this guy walked me through in each episode is basically the first half of each episode is just a story. It's not a bunch of interviews. It's telling a story about what happened in one place with one problem. And he described to me, there was no internet in Burma. It was a closed country. It was a North Korea style country. There was almost 0% internet penetration. And then because of the opening up that happened there over the last decade, within a year, it went from 0% internet to 95% internet coverage. But the entire experience of the internet in this country was on phones and through the Facebook app because people didn't have computers, because Google didn't even have

Burmese script. So imagine going from getting no information, maybe all you get is like state-run media for a junta, and then suddenly you think you have all the information in the world, and it's Facebook. I think like at the beginning, Facebook see Myanmar as a new market that hasn't been explored, right? So they came to the country without thinking of

what are the impact of Facebook for the population. Like if you look at the data around 2014, Facebook has only about two or three content moderators for the country. For the whole country? For the whole country. Two or three people for a country of 60 million people. Yeah, two or three people who monitor head content,

review the content on Facebook. And of course, what it became was virulent disinformation and hate campaigns. And the people consuming it had no reason to think it wasn't true. So if they're reading about Muslims rampaging or raping Buddhist women, they think it's the internet, it's Facebook, it's trusted news, right? And the result, in part, is it contributed to the ethnic cleansing that took place there. But it's a window into what's happened here, right? Which is that people consume Facebook and they think it's shared by their friends.

They think it's credible. They don't know what's true and what's not. And so the same lack of antibodies against disinformation. And the same Facebook platform that turbocharges hate speech and sensational images and stories contributed both to the Russian intervention in our election and to what happened in Myanmar. We're all in the same boat here. And that's something I want people to take away from this podcast is that what's happening in these other countries is the same shit that's happening here. So we need to learn from each other. You're right.

That connection really does come through. It's like, you know, imagine the problem of your mother or grandmother thinking that every Facebook post is accurate and magnify that by the entire country. And then imagine what Facebook has done to gut local newspapers around the country or any media, frankly, in the US, and then magnify that by having no independent media to check the disinformation that's spreading on Facebook. I thought that was like, I thought one of the most tragic and preventable examples of this like systemic growing problem that we face right now. Yeah. And what I like about, you know,

what we arrived at in the format when like about, you know, what we arrived at in the format when we got, you know, the crooked team around it and a team of folks around it is okay. Like we'll tell this story and it's like, oh shit, this is a big problem. But then in the second part of that episode, and this, again, the same format for each episode, we hear from a whole bunch of people about what to do about it. So we've got, you know, leading European thinkers and politicians. We got people who are going to be in the Biden administration. We got tech activists around the world talking about, well, how should we regulate social media? How should we approach

platforms like Facebook? So we want to leave people with a sense of just how bad things are, but also like, hey, here's what we can do about it. And here are all these smart people around the world who are thinking about this. So it's not just Americans. It's something we have to solve together as progressives globally. Yeah, you really did a good job of looking around the world for solutions to problems. And honestly, my favorite part of the show is that we go with you around the globe to meet all these unbelievable, mostly young, inspiring activists. How did you get connected with all these people? Were these Obama affiliations? Because every country in the globe, you tend to know the 30, 40-year-old inspiring MP that is the future of the country.

Well, yeah. I mean, some of it is Obama Foundation people. So the Obama Foundation has networks of young leaders that are generally civil society leaders around the world. And I've gone, and some of the interviews I did were kind of on the margins of these Obama Foundation convenings in Johannesburg, in Malaysia, in Germany. Some of it is I ask people. So I ask for references. I go to Human Rights Watch. Hey, who should I talk to about China? go to Human Rights Watch, you know, hey, who should I talk to about China, right? And people want to tell their stories, particularly at this moment in time. And Hong Kong was an interesting piece of this, because I met a, you know, a tremendous young person who was in an Obama Foundation program. But then I also met the Human Rights Watch people. And then I asked them for

references of people to talk to. And then we to. So if you listen to the show, we've got, as the Hong Kong protests are unfolding and tragically, ultimately, run into Beijing's repression, you have different Hong Kong voices of people I've met in different venues in different parts of the world who are involved in these protests at different junctures. And you hear how they're wrestling with and how they're dealing with it. One of them even had to obscure his voice because he obviously feared for his family's safety, not just his own. So I was able to tap into like that Obama network. I was able to tap into other civil society networks. I was able to tap into some of the political leaders I've met over the years. David Lammy, a remarkable rising labor politician

in the UK we've had on Pod Save the World, kind of walked me through, well, how did we get to Brexit? I mean, what happened inside of the UK that brought back this form of nationalism? And so I think one of the cool things about the project is over the course of a couple of years, really, I was just taking my recorder with me all over the world. And so these interviews are literally taped, I think, on every continent, except for, you know, Antarctica, I guess, is a continent. So I didn't get there. But everywhere else, you know, with voices from all these places, from former prime ministers like Kevin Rudd down to like, like you say, whoever the most interesting 30-year-old activist is I could find.

Well, and the other thing that's cool about this is like, again, this was mostly done in the before times before COVID and you could travel. A lot of the times you were in countries where interviewing an activist about their concerns about the current government is a risky proposition. I mean, were there times you were having to be furtive, cover your tracks, communicate covertly. Like, how did you pull this off? Well, you know, what's interesting is in a bunch of the most extreme scenarios, I did things in third countries. So, you know, one of the prominent Hong Kong interviews I did in Malaysia because the person was traveling there. And, you know, you find increasingly like that, that that's something you have to do.

You know, when you get inside Europe, you get a place like Hungary. Hungary is within the EU, right? And so it's not as if it's hard to get in and out of Hungary. I did at times, though, recognize I wasn't facing any risk, but some of the people talking to me were. And I always ask people, like, what are you comfortable saying and doing? Are you comfortable taking this risk? A good example is one of the activists I talked to who was from China, lived in Hong Kong,

I think was basically kicked out of Hong Kong and is now in New York, right? So her risk ultimately led her, I think, to have to be in some form of exile. So her risk ultimately led her, I think, to have to be in some form of exile. But other activists, they know the risks that they're taking and talking to you, and they take it anyway. The India story I tell is entirely through the prism of Rana Ayyub, who is a remarkable journalist, who's had massive amounts of death threats, had fake pornography circulated about her, has had massive disinformation death threats, had fake pornography circulated about her, has had massive disinformation campaigns against her. And she sticks it out and she accepts all

the risk of being a journalist in Mumbai and reporting what's happening under an increasingly nationalist Indian government. And that's what she's taking on, right? So I think what's most extraordinary is that all these people are willing to raise their voices despite the danger they face. Yeah. Rana Ayyub is like a truly heroic journalist. And that is one of my favorite episodes because of the way you connected the current nationalism under Modi in India with India's history of Gandhi fighting for freedom and universal rights and how he inspired Martin Luther King and how it was all tied into US history and our civil rights movement. It's just an incredible, it's an incredible experience to sort of go abroad to learn about our own history in the way that you did in that episode. Yeah. One of the best things that I liked

about this project is, you know, it's always good when you end up somewhere that you didn't start, you know? Yeah, right. And so for me, I learned a lot. And one of the things I kept picking up is there was a lot of commonality in terms of the far right creeps in the world learning from one another, right?

And so when we get to India, you know, Modi has a citizenship law that is basically a Muslim ban. And it's not a leap to think that he might have picked something up from Trump. And there's this kind of symbiotic relationship between what Modi and Trump have been up to in terms of having these kind of ethno-nationalist conceptions of what the nation state is. At the same time, in talking to people about the history of India, I started to learn more and revisit what used to be the symbiotic relationship between Gandhi and the movement for India's independence and the American civil rights

movement. And I was thinking, well, how do we go from a place where progressives used to coordinate across borders, and you could have a Gandhi inspiring a king to make this enormous change in both countries, to the wrong people learning from one another. And right as I was kind of, you know, in that space, BLM exploded in the US. And then you saw all these protests around the world in support of BLM. And one of the basic conclusions I came to is what we need around the world is a massive progressive mobilization. It's going to take a global Black Lives Matter movement. It's going to take global support for Hong Kong protests or for Indians who are facing repression or people in European countries that are drifting towards dictatorship to all stand up together. And I got there by visiting all these places and hearing from these people

and having them tell me, hey, the right has been well organized. The left has not been. We got to get our stuff together inside our own countries, but across borders as well. Yeah, I love that episode. I mean, listen, part of it is Ron Ayub is just someone I could listen to talk for hours on end. Totally. It was inspiring, but it was just such a cool turn of our history. Last question for you. I mean, you ended up interviewing a ton of people who are now

the most senior individuals on Joe Biden's foreign policy team on the campaign, and it will probably take up like the most senior positions in his administration. A lot of these conversations were before they were officially involved in the campaign, which I think led them maybe to speak a little more freely than they might have. Did anything they say surprised you? Do you think anybody wants to to take something back that's going to wind up in the show? Because I have very candid stuff from senior sober people. Yeah, well, look, I think what you get what what's so great about this is like you and I have been there, Tommy, like we when you enter into a campaign, what you can say like suddenly

shrinks and, you know, and then you're in government and you're just a spokesperson. Right. Even if it's stuff you totally agree with. And what was great about this is I reported over a couple of years and, you know, got to talk to people, you know, who we worked with, right? Like Jake Sullivan and Avril Haines and Susan Rice, very prominently, obviously, and Samantha Power and others who might play these critical roles in the Biden administration and just kind of get their worldview and get their sense of what does the United States need to do about China? What does the United States need to do to regulate social media?

Like what does U.S. leadership on climate look like? And from their own perspectives. And so I think people will get a window into what the people who end up working for a Biden administration, what do they think? How do they think about these issues? And yeah, in some cases, very concrete ideas about what U.S. policy should be. Think about these issues. And yeah, in some cases, very concrete ideas about what U.S. policy should be.

But I think most valuable is just this is maybe the last time you get to hear them just talk as human beings. I know. I know. They have to become, you know, campaign spokespeople or surrogates and then government officials. And I say that with humility. I was once one of those people. Oh, me too, man. We were both, you know, robots.

We were not allowed to say anything. Yeah. So I don't want to put any one person on the spot. I will say, though, there's a collection of people that I think you would expect to be making up the kind of inner circle. And because I was talking to them in 2018, 19, you know, early 20, I do think you'll get a sense of how are these people wrestling with the same problems that we wrestle with in the series?

And what might that mean for a Biden presidency and foreign policy? Yeah. Well, listen, it is such a great show. I don't think any of them will regret the things they said, but I do think it will be incredibly instructive for people who want to know how they'll govern in areas like tech regulation, right? Like you have Jake Sullivan talking in great length about how he thinks technology companies should or could be regulated. And I think that's fascinating and instructive because it's probably not an area where Joe Biden has the most deeply developed views, you know? Yeah, no. And what I hope people take away from the interviews with these folks is that we're all human beings here, right? And we're all wrestling with these things. We're wrestling with our own

experience and what we're seeing, right? And so like, yeah, someone like Jake spent a lot of time thinking about tech in part because in 2016, he was working for Hillary and he saw how Facebook was manipulated to essentially defeat his then boss. And so he really wrestled with it and he really thought deeply about it. You know, what is the responsibility on these tech companies and what is the role of government if they don't meet those responsibilities? And I think that's true of all the government voices. John Brennan is in there talking about how to demilitarize our approach to

terrorism, you know, and, and how to, how to emphasize other aspects of U S leadership in the middle East. You know, Susan Rice is in there talking about the connection between social justice in this country and our leadership around the world, you know, amidst, you know, the Black Lives Matter movement. Samantha Power reflecting what she learned during the Ebola response and what that means for how the U.S. needs to think about international cooperation. And so what I love about it is it's both those people kind of putting out policy positions

that they think are important, but even more importantly, like it shows you how they've been informed by their experiences in government. And I, frankly, try to do that myself. And there are multiple places in the podcast where I say, I wish we'd done something different in the Obama years, or if we'd known then, you know, what was going to happen, we would have thought about it differently. Or, you know, I think we got this right, but here's how you build on it. And I think showing all this as a human endeavor is something that you can do in a podcast and you can't do in a lot of other formats. Yeah. None of these issues are simple.

None of the answers are simple. It's nice to hear people just sort of think aloud about the problem, the range of possibilities and everything in between. Ben, people should subscribe to Missing America right now. The trailer is up. You can find it on Apple. You can find it on Spotify. When is the first episode going to hit their inboxes

once they subscribe? So Tuesday. So next week, Tuesday, smash the subscribe button. Give us that five-star rating. No, I mean, I just say this has been kind of a passion project and it's great that Crooked got behind it because the opportunity to bring all these voices, particularly the global voices,

I think folks will think it's hopefully worth checking out. It's really great to have that opportunity. It's an incredible show and I also can confirm that Ben has put blood, sweat, and tears into this thing.

There have been hours and hours a day of him sitting in a closet with a blanket over his head, trying to record voiceover with little kids running around the house. It's not easy to do this stuff remotely, man. Let me tell you, so when I signed up to this,

I was like, oh, this is great. I'll take these interviews. And first of all, none of the cricket people really, I think level with me about how much work a scripted podcast is. It's a shit ton of work. And there's a great team of people that get you from like a bunch of interviews to a script.

But then I was like, oh, this will be great. Every Tuesday I come in, I tape Pods of the World with Tommy, and I'll record all my stuff there. And boom, then the pandemic hits right when I'm supposed to start doing this. So I have to build a pillow fort in my closet downstairs where all my kids toys are by the way the toy storage closet so sometimes they're like banging on the door they're trying to invade the closet like i've got people in my ears telling me that i'm not speaking like you know the people do in this american life or whatever and i'm like come on man like just like this is not how i saw this going but but i'm glad it turned out like it did you're like sitting on a lego it's just stabbing you it's i'm sitting on

a lincoln logs i literally recorded the whole thing on a giant bucket of lincoln logs in my closet um so thankfully crooked has access to tremendous sound designers. Uh, that's true. That is very true. Uh, podcasting. It is glamorous. I say this as I had to escape from my bedroom where there was a lawnmower to my office or someone has a different lawnmower. I'm so sick of this quarantine shit, but missing America.

We'll get you through it. Subscribe. It is incredible. Ben, great to talk to you over on this side of the house. Uh, I guess we talked about foreign policy anyway, so whatever. Subscribe. It is incredible. Ben, great to talk to you over on this side of the house. I guess we talked about foreign policy anyway, so whatever. Yeah. Glad to be on the side of the house. I think it's like once a year I get over here and then you send me back. Well, we just got to find something to rant about and just come on. It's like pre-record

something just to shout about Marco Rubio. Yeah, yeah. We can do that. We can get back to that. Thanks to Manny Garcia and Cliff Walker and Ben Rhodes for joining us today. And everyone have a good weekend. We'll talk to you next week. Bye, everyone. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez.

Our associate producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Tanya Sominator, Katie Long, Roman Papadimitriou, Caroline Rustin, and Elisa Gutierrez for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Melkonian, Yale Freed, and Milo Kim, who film and upload these episodes as videos every week. Hey guys, we have some good news for anyone looking for a little retail therapy courtesy of your friends here at Crooked Media. We just put tons of new items on the Crooked store. They're on sale for up to 70% off. That's a good deal. They're friends of the pod teas.

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